Hand-held food is great for summer parties. But there are some tricks of the “trade,” so to speak, you’ll want to keep in imind when crafting the perfect food for your beautiful summer. You might want to provide your family with a beautiful outdoor dining experience a few times a week. Or you might want to invite guests to come and experience your cooking skill on your newly installed outdoor veranda. However, food eaten outside is sometimes a little different than the food you can eat outside on a typical dinner table.

While the food needs to be more convenient, it needn’t be overbearingly difficult to make or be any less flavorful.

In order to experience the best that your kitchen has to offer while dining outside, consider providing family and friends with the following hand-held food items:

Pizza – The Ultimate Hand-Held Food

Pizza, famously easy to eat anywhere, is amazing to make from scratch but can be challenging to get exactly right. Once you’ve spread your dough, separated the cheese and come up with your own beautiful tomato sauce with a hint of spice, throwing your beautiful creation onto a pizza stone in the oven can lend your pizza the air of Italian authenticity. Stone grilling a pizza is much more preferable to your standard oven because it helps the bread stay more evenly crispy and lends that beautiful char-grilled flavor to the base itself. To help prevent sticking, scatter some corn meal on the stone before placing your pie on it.

Pizza is a great food item to make with your family. In dividing a lot of different ingredients, you can allow your children to place their own toppings. This, in turn, can serve as a fun activity for them. Hopefully, it will spawn the desire for your little ones to be competent cooks as they grow up.

Tacos – Hand-Held Food from South of the Border

Much like pizza, the intrinsically grabbable nature of a taco serves to make it the ultimate convenience food. When you makie the ingredients yourself, you can pull together some very flavorful options. For the perfect salsa, I’d recommend:

a small crushed garlic clove,

a squeeze of lime juice,

chopped coriander,

eight tomatoes peeled and chopped,

around a full onion also chopped very finely,

vinegar and

seasoning.

For a little taste of something different that really works, consider chopping two tablespoons of pineapple to bring out that citrus bite.

The only problem you’ll have with tacos is that they are so ‘more-ish,’ you’re likely to be all out while the guests satiate their hunger and beyond.

Skewers – Hand-Held Food on a Stick

Never fear, if worried about children, you can find wooden skewers with ease that can be snipped at the end to prevent any sharp end injuries from occurring. Aside from that, using skewers to help cook various meats and cheeses, such as chorizo and halloumi, lightly seasoned with pepper and a very, very tiny sprinkle of rosemary can make for the perfect and most convenient appetizer. These can serve as a perfect side accessory to your main dish, and can also be happily used to mop up any of the salsa left over from your taco’s.

These foods, well made, should bring your family a beautiful mealtime worth remembering.

When you eat crappy food, your health declines and your energy ebbs. You even become more prone to illness.

However, when you eat healthful foods, you gain energy and vitality and your immune system becomes stronger.

Grab your copy of Top 10 Power-Packed Foods to find out which foods provide the best nutrition for your money. You'll also receive three emails expanding on what is in the report, providing tips on how to incorporate them into your diet.